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Abstract
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Sri Lanka is a multi-religious South-Asian nation with 22 million people. Compared to its regional counterparts, Sri Lanka has a higher school life expectancy (14.11 years), better transition rates to secondary education (99.4%), and literacy rates for youth (99%), signifying the importance of schools in the well-being of children and adolescents.
An armed conflict that lasted three decades, causing enormous physical and psychological trauma in North-eastern Sri Lanka, ended in 2009. A post-war era study in 2014 found a prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems at 13.8% in primary school children in Sri Lanka. The peace and stability over the following decade were disarranged by the Easter Sunday Bombings of Catholic Churches and luxury hotels in 2019, killing more than 250. In the following year, the world was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 600,000 confirmed and probably many more unconfirmed cases in Sri Lanka. While COVID-19 is persisting, another fallout due to the depletion of foreign reserves occurred, creating a scarcity of imported fuel, gas, food items and medicine. School education was heavily affected by the lack of transportation for children and even the unavailability of paper to conduct examinations. Authorities have imposed rolling power cuts as a substantial proportion of the electricity production is dependent on imported fossil fuel, depriving school and university students of online learning time. This situation led to mass protests by youth in Colombo and the resignation of the cabinet en masse in April and the prime minister in May 2022...
Language: en |